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Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Cifu's legacy

One year has already gone by since Cifu left us. He was the dean of Spanish jazz commentators, still active on national public radio, and his absence is still deeply felt. Time flies, though. Life goes on, there is music, and we are still breathing.

After the rains of sadness and tribute, In the months after Cifu's passing, happier news have been reaching our shores. One is the establishment of the association CifuJazz and its brand new website, to promote his legacy. The other one is the recovery, pushed hard by Cifu's family—his wife and daughters—of the series Jazz entre amigos, which aired from 1984 to 1991, on Spanish national television.

What this programme meant for my generation, barely a decade after Franco's passing, can only be described with superlatives. Today, in the age of the Internet, YouTube, and immediate access to whatever crosses one's mind, it may be hard to grasp that these weekly one-hour programmes were the first and, for years, only chance to watch the makers of this music. Bear in mind too that this was a low-budget programme; regarding its contents and approach, this was 1980s Spain, and jazz historiography has improved enormously since then. That said, and even though the programmes are, obviously, in the local language, I think non-Spanish speakers will find the footage, with abundant live performances and interviews, and some of it rather obscure, appealing enough to check this out.

Cifu's legacy remains with us, thanks to good people of the RTVE archive and the firm push by Asociación CifuJazz to keep this available to the public.

As of now (it is worth checking once a month), the programmes are as follows (and the date of the original broadcast):